On the first day of the year 2009, my father's cell phone stopped working. Oh, it could make calls and even ring, but you couldn't hear anything and nobody could hear you.

I got all ready to help out by preparing to have a long and unpleasant service call to a land far away when my dad had the brilliant but surely old-fashioned idea of doing it locally. By actually walking into a Verizon store.

The wait in the store turned out to be quality time with my dad, on a comfortable couch. All of the store employees gave the biggest smiles. And the best part was that less than ten minutes after they called us up, my dad had a brand new phone in his hand. With his contact list moved over. For a charge of $0.

I call that #1 service.

IBM just published the #1 SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark in the land. This #1 leadership result used IBM BladeCenter and IBM Power Systems, WebSphere, DB2, and IBM System Storage.(1)

Some of you may be happier not to be able to hear your parents when they call. But my dad gives tours in museums, almost always has a funny political joke to tell, and may even be my #1 fan.

Sun has recently begun claiming that they are the first and only vendor to disclose actual power consumption while running certain benchmarks. Which is all very great. Until you realize that they are essentially measuring themselves.

Wouldn't it be great if we could all do that ? This year Academy awards will be handed out by the directors of movies. To themselves. This year restaurants will give themselves stars. And what could be most fun of all -- this year your management team will not be giving you a performance rating. You will be rating yourself.

The only really sure way to know that a performance claim is valid is having a result audited by a third party. Trusted benchmark consortia. Like SPEC, as an example.

And gee, isn't it ironic that in the only current industry standard power-performance benchmark (which by the way happens to be SPECpower_ssj2008) -- Sun has yet to publish any results.

************************************************Source: www.spec.org. Results current as of 01/14/09.

This week HP tells a "Real Story" claiming more performance than IBM on the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark. And if they did their job, they would have told the whole story.

You see, for this benchmark, it is important to look at all the data. That means the database server hardware and software as well as the application hardware and software. And if you look at the database server you would see that HP needed over 3x the number of database cores that IBM needed to get only 1.5x the performance.(1)

To do the benchmark analysis job well, you need to examine all of the data available. Not just the parts that make your story more real.

This week President Obama spoke with the pilot who skillfully landed the Airbus 320 in the Hudson River. The pilot told him, "Me and my crew, we were just doing our job."

"And it made me think, if everybody did their job -- whatever that job was -- as well as that pilot did his job, we'd be in pretty good shape," Obama said.